Pain Minimized or Dismissed as Catastrophizing

When does normal concern about relentless pain become excessive and catastrophizing?

Who has the power to make this decision?

I’m exasperated and offended by the recent over-promotion and over-simplification of the latest popular theory about chronic pain, which uses the derogatory term “catastrophizing” to describe our well-founded concerns about our pain.

Collectively, pain catastrophizing is characterized by the tendency to magnify the threat value of pain stimulus and to feel helpless in the context of pain, and by a relative inability to inhibit pain-related thoughts in anticipation of, during or following a painful encounter.

Then the researchers ran studies looking for these tendencies in pain patients – and found them. This seems a blatant case of confirmation bias.

When researchers announced their findings that “catastrophizing is related to worsened pain”, the media hype machine went into action and either implied or stated outright that “catastrophizing causes pain”. It seems like the perfect story: it’s an extension of the self-help movement (and victim-blaming) and it fits right in with the cultural imperative to “tough it out” and “don’t be a wimp”.

No one seems to notice the data from the study shows only that “catastrophizing is correlated with worsened pain.” All this proves is that more pain is more distressing.

Our pain has indeed become a catastrophe as we lose access to the effective pain relief of opioids. Shifting the blame from physical nociception to mental “catastrophizing” confirms what many patients have suspected of our doctors: if they can’t find a physical cause, doctors tend to believe our pain is a psychological problem instead.

The public is more than happy to hear that we’re causing our own pain with our “bad attitude”. Better yet, treatment for catastrophizing requires no opioids, just talk therapy. And best of all, if our pain still does not improve, then it’s our own fault.

The popular media touts the psychological treatment of catastrophizing as a virtual cure for chronic pain. Countless articles explain over and over how we pain patients are worsening (or even causing) our own pain by catastrophizing and we don’t even know it. If only we would stop “catastrophizing”, they say, our pain would be manageable and we would not need opioids.

Placing the blame for our chronic pain on a “bad attitude” gives everyone license to bludgeon us with accusations of mental weakness or addiction. Itallays any guilt for letting pain patients suffer without opioids: if we don’t respond to their suggested psychological treatment, then we are either weak or addicted and it becomes *our* problem. They can wash their hands of us, write us off as hopeless drug-seeking addicts.

Diagnosing patients with intractable pain as “catastrophizing” is an attack on the legitimacy of our pain, an attempt to weasel out of the difficult job of medically treating our pain, and even a ruse to blame us for our own misfortune.

Another study specifically addressed the issue of whether catastrophizing causes pain. Although the healthy participants used for this study cannot substitute for people who have been in pain for years and decades, the study makes an important point:

“we cannot yet rule out the possibility that at least some aspects of catastrophization may actually be the product of an intense pain experience, rather than its cause.

That is, the more intense the pain feels to the person, themore likely they are to have thoughts about it that fit the definition of catastrophization.”

According to experts on this topic, I should be able to reduce my pain by having a positive attitude and minimizing catastrophizing. However, looking over the detailed pain, activity, and medication diary I’ve kept for years, I can see that my pain level does not correspond to my levels of distress.

My pain can be low during the worst days of depression and can become crippling on my happiest days. I’ve had to leave or cancel several significant joyous events, like a wedding and a large family gathering, that I’d looked forward to for weeks and months. My pain unpredictably flared on just those days.

I skipped the wedding and went to the reception despite my pain, believing that my happiness and the positive energy of the crowd would surely ease my perception of pain. But standing or sitting around was killing my low back and a little bit of dancing set off my mysterious and excruciating visceral pain. An hour later I had to concede defeat and go back home.

People want to believe that chronic pain is an attitude issue and congratulate themselves for not being the fearful worriers they assume we are. They don’t want to know that even the “best” attitude cannot protect them and, even more frighteningly:

Chronic pain can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere… even YOU.

Feeling fearful or distressed can certainly make any pain more noticeable and “uncomfortable”, but even the best attitude, the strongest will, and the greatest courage provide no guarantee of relief from chronic pain.

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8 thoughts on “Pain Minimized or Dismissed as Catastrophizing”

These quack psychologists no doubt looking to please their funders and get attention for their work, created Catastrophization out of thin air. The part about affect is particularly noxious, it proves there is a Catch 22. People with unrelenting intractable chronic pain with a negative affect, are catastrophizing, but if they have a positive affect, they are lying about their pain. It ties into the ongoing false narrative about mindset. Maybe someday and objective look at all of this will be on a par with the Nazi’s, and their justification for their sadistic experiments on human beings. It is important to override our human concept of empathy, in order to ensure profitability and market share. The Industries will fund anything that casts doubt on pain, despair, or fact based reality.

I was thinking this morning about their idea that chronic pain can’t exist b/c pain is the body’s way of warning of harm, and after the harm is over the body wouldn’t continue broadcasting the pain signals. I found myself wondering how it was that these wackos have managed to survive long enough to learn how to read without noticing that physiology is not exactly perfect or error-free. It’s sorta like saying that the body produces insulin to deal with blood glucose levels, therefore it’s not possible that anyone could ever have problems with blood sugar levels. Do they expect those so-called “diabetics” to fix their attitudes & the diabetes will go away?

I truly resent this term that seeks to minimize and trivialize pain, I love how so-called experts who have never suffered from or experience severe chronic pain feel they have the right to dismiss something they know nothing about, considering that fully 1/3 of all Americans now deal with chronic pain at some level these people need to stop, also the fact that doctors have almost no education re pain of any kind I would like to know where and how all the so-called experts feel they have the right to say anything re pain, we can thank our corrupt govt and big pharma for this omission in education I can only hope Karma steps in and they experience severe chronic pain then we can talk till then STFU

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